If I were Tamara Drewe’s title character, a newspaper columnist who shakes up the English village of her youth when she returns from London with a tiny new nose and a big new attitude, I would write that Gemma Arterton led me into her hotel bedroom with the obvious goal of seducing me. But I’m not, so I’ll admit that Arterton—who stars as Tamara in Stephen Frears’s new film, which had its Cinema Society premiere last night—was only trying to find a quiet place to conduct our interview.

Jenni Miller: True or false: writers are totally crazy.

Gemma Arterton: True! But I think that anyone that’s creative is a bit nuts…. I’m not a writer but I do know a lot of writers, and I also know a lot of songwriters, and one particular person I know, she dramatizes her own life so that she can write a song or something about it. And I thought, That is so what Tamara does. Read More

Gemma Arterton looked more Bond girl than country girl when she strolled in for the Tamara Drewe screening in New York City last night.

Gone were the cut-off jeans that have adorned her latest film’s posters and instead the actress stunned in a floor length strapless black gown. Read More

Actors Dominic Cooper, Gemma Arterton, Luke Evans and Bill Camp, and director Stephen Frears attended the Cinema Society and Altoids’s screening of Tamara Drewe at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York City tonight.

GALLERY LINKS:
– Events: The Cinema Society Hosts A Screening of “Tamara Drewe”
– Events: The Cinema Society Hosts A Screening of “Tamara Drewe” – After Party

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Photos taken while Gemma Arterton was in Toronto to promote Tamara Drewe.

GALLERY LINK:
– Photoshoots: 2010 Toronto Film Festival – Portraits (September 12, 2010)

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In London, Selfridges opened the largest shoe department in the world. Gemma Arterton helped launch the Shoe Galleries on September 23rd. Gemma chose the military trend by wearing a sharp-shouldered Balmain jacket in navy. She wore a white tee underneath the military jacket and completed her outfit with a pair of cropped leather pants by Isabel Marant and Christian Louboutin pumps.

GALLERY LINKS:
– Scans: The Sun (UK) – September 24, 2010, thanks to Lorna
– Scans: Daily Telegraph (UK) – September 24, 2010, thanks to Lorna
– Scans: InStyle (UK) – October 2010, thanks to Lorna
– Scans: Elle (USA) – October 2010
– Events: The Official Launch Of The Shoe Galleries At Selfridges

Follow us: http://twitter.com/gemma_arterton

LOS ANGELES – Director Stephen Frears has known graphic novelist Posy Simmonds long enough to forget exactly how they met, only that it was about three decades ago. For years, he had followed her quirky comic musings on rural English life, fame and the general discontent of writers in her popular British newspaper comic strip, “Tamara Drewe.” But adapting the comic into a film? That he never saw coming.

“It never crossed my mind that you could make a film with it until I got the script,” Frears said on a recent swing through Los Angeles on his way to Telluride and then the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film played. “Posy is such a brilliant woman. Everything about the story was coherent, so I found it very, very inspiring … actually liberating. Because it was what I call a cartoon, you could leave bits out – I loved that you didn’t have to do the boring things.” Read More

There is a moment in the film Tamara Drewe when the sultry Gemma Arterton wears a tight red top and a skimpy pair of hotpants. It’s a deeply provocative image that was used on the poster for the film in France.

Her new film project is as intriguing as Arterton herself. In the film, which is a celluloid version of Posy Simmonds’ cult cartoon novel, Arterton plays the eponymous lead, a girl who leaves rural Dorset to seek fame as a journalist, only to return to her childhood home when her mother dies.

Central to the plot is Drewe’s reinvention of herself. As a schoolgirl, she was a dowdy, almost ugly, girl with a huge nose. Arterton had to wear a prosthetic nose and greasy hair. Her return as a beautiful femme fatale was as unexpected as it was electrifying, but through flashbacks we learn that the catalyst for her transformation from caterpillar to butterfly was a nose job that transformed her looks and bolstered her confidence. Read More